‘Sharp Objects’ star Amy Adams and director Jean-Marc Vallée talk family dysfunction
The TV series looks at Camille Preaker, a troubled reporter with a penchant for drinking and cutting herself, and examines the cycle of mental abuse and the way women treat each other
Get actress Amy Adams and director Jean-Marc Vallée into a room together and at some point Led Zeppelin might start blaring through the puny speakers of an iPhone, with Adams doing a subtle singalong midway.
“We could keep this going”, Adams warns, as she bobs her head in time along with Vallée to the iconic band’s What Is and What Should Never Be inside a Beverly Hills hotel on a recent afternoon.
The musical moment is enough to make you wonder what could have been. The two were set to team up on a biopic of Janis Joplin, with Adams, a multi-Oscar nominee whose work in films such as Arrival, American Hustle, Nocturnal Animals and The Master propelled her to the top ranks of Hollywood actresses, set to play the ’60s rock singer.
That project was ultimately shelved. But music, ever so slightly, has finally united them in a different endeavour: HBO’s Sharp Objects.
Making its premiere on July 8, the limited series is an adaptation of the 2006 debut novel of the same name from author Gillian Flynn, whose other novels, Gone Girl and Dark Places, were made into feature films.
Sharp Objects is a psychological thriller that stars Adams as Camille Preaker, a troubled reporter with a penchant for drinking and cutting herself, who has been assigned to cover the mysterious murders of two young girls in her small Missouri hometown of Wind Gap. The journey to her fictional home also forces Camille to confront the corrosive effects of her psychologically abusive relationship with her mother, Adora, played by Patricia Clarkson.
It is a series 12 years in the making – and one that was intended to be a feature film. That is until Marti Noxon, the writer and producer behind UnReal and Dietland, persuaded the producers who had optioned the book that the only smart way to make this was for TV.
“I said, here’s who I am. This is a TV show, it’s not a movie,” Noxon recalled. “And [the producers] were like, ‘Well, we’re pretty far down the road to make it a movie.’ And I said, ‘I think you’re wrong’ until they eventually saw that I was right’ … My argument really was that these kind of female characters are not successful in films and could get shovelled off to an indie – or it could be a studio movie where they try to make it Less Sharp Objects. But for it to be as provoking and to build out some of the characters, it belonged on TV. You would have lost all that.”
Flynn characterises the long journey from book to screen more simply: “The book was waiting for Amy.”
The eight-episode miniseries is directed entirely by Vallée, who won an Emmy for helming the first season of last year’s critically acclaimed Big Little Lies. And in keeping with Vallée’s reputation for preferring songs over score music to amplify emotions, Sharp Objects makes noticeable use of music, including Led Zeppelin (hence the jam session) – for reasons that will reveal themselves as the series plays out on the small screen.